How to Export and Import passwords in Chrome browser

In our Chrome Flags tutorial, we talked about the 10 most useful flags settings that can improve your browsing experience. Today, in this post we are going to put our heads together about yet another useful flag that can be used to export and import passwords in Chrome browser.

Needless to say, passwords are a really crucial asset. Saving it in a browser makes things easy for you. You don’t need to go back in your head and try to remember it every time. What if you want to back up your passwords? You don’t get an option to export and import your saved passwords by default in Chrome – but you can enable the same via Chrome flags. Here’s how to import or export passwords from the Manage passwords section in Settings, by enabling a Chrome flag.

Export and Import Passwords in Chrome

UPDATE: Things have changed in recent versions of Chrome browser. Please read the full post as well as the comments. You may now use ChromePass to manage your passwords.

In current versions of Chrome, you can directly copy-paste the following in Chrome’s address bar and hit Enter to open Import/Export:

chrome://flags/#password-import-export

chrome://settings/passwords

The following method applies to earlier versions of Chrome only. Now we suggest you use a 3rd-party tool to export and import Chrome passwords.

1. In earlier versions, you could launch Chrome browser, then type “chrome://flags” or “about://flags” in the address bar and hit Enter.

2. In the Chrome flags window, hit Ctrl+F and search for “password import and export”. The corresponding flag entry should be highlighted. Available for all the major desktop OS platforms, this flag can be used to directly export or import your saved passwords in Chrome. From the drop-down menu, select Enabled to turn the flag on. Now, relaunch your browser to make the changes effective.

3. After relaunching the browser, navigate to Chrome settings menu by entering chrome://settings in the address bar. Scroll down to the bottom and click on Show advanced settings.

4. Scroll down further through Advanced settings to section named Passwords and forms.

5. Click on Manage passwords link to administer your saved passwords, as shown in the image above. A new window should pop up with all your saved passwords.

6. Scroll down through the list and look for Export and Import buttons at the end of the list.

8. Once Windows account password is entered and validated, you can save your passwords in a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file format on your PC.

9. Similarly, if you want to import any password to your Chrome browser and store it in saved passwords, you can prepare a CSV file with the following values mentioned in the file:

Name: Website name on which you have the account

URL: Login URL for the website

Username: Your active username on the website

Password: Password for the mentioned username

10. The Import button lets you import your saved passwords.

This small experimental feature can come in handy when you want to have a backup of your saved passwords in Chrome so that in the case of any unforeseen circumstances, you can restore them in your browser.

BillA adds in Comments:

In Chrome 65.x the import/export flags have changed to:

chrome://flags/#PasswordImport
chrome://flags/#PasswordExport

Select “Enabled” then close down ALL chrome windows and relaunch it, and you’ll be able to import/export your passwords into a file.

Use Tools

ChromePass is a free password recovery tool for Windows which allows you to view the user names and passwords stored by Google Chrome Web browser. You can select the items and then save them into an HTML/XML/Text file or copy them to the clipboard.

You may also use this tool from Github to make Chrome show all your passwords in format ready to import in other browsers.

Driven by my immense passion for Windows & other Microsoft technologies, I love to keep myself abreast of the latest strides and swings in the world of technology. I am fond of traveling to mountains & love to help others with their technical or non-technical setbacks.

Hi, I too had the issue where ‘promised buttons’ didn’t appear even after the ‘material’ disable fix described above. I was about to try another method (console js, mentioned elsewhere) and the procedure there said to first navigate to chrome://settings-frame/passwords. When I did that the buttons were visible – so it would seem that for me using settings-frame rather than settings made a difference – for me it is repeatable. Posted just in case it works for others as well.
My chrome version: Version 59.0.3071.109 (Developer Build) Built on Ubuntu , running on LinuxMint 17 (32-bit)

I only needed the export. However I have just tried the import facility by exporting, deleting an existing password record and then importing the exported file. Record was recovered, so working OK. If you’ve not already done something similar may be worth a try, as if this works for you, would seem to suggest the problem is with the csv file you are trying to import?

As I’m about to ditch chrome as my primary browser, I needed an easy way of dumping all the saved passwords for the various ‘non critical’ accounts on websites I’d registered with, all the other methods outlined above didn’t work, and I was about to do things the ‘hard way’ (cutting and pasting all the revealed/showed individual passwords from the normal password page)

You must not value your privacy to allow google to store your passwords somewhere in the cloud, for malicious hackers to have fun with them.
But lots of other folks do. 😉

If you don’t wish to save your password online, here’s a simple method to import/export it to a file on a portable flash/thumb drive.
In Chrome 65.x the import/export flags have changed to:

chrome://flags/#PasswordImport
chrome://flags/#PasswordExport

Select “Enabled” then close down ALL chrome windows and relaunch it, and you’ll be able to import/export your passwords to a file on a portable flash/thumb drive.
This way it’s not out there for hackers to grab them. 😉